80-year-old Thomas recounts his childhood and middle age through a series of flashbacks and dream sequences. Thomas believes he’s been taken away from a better life at birth; following a hospital fire, he vividly recalls being swapped with another new-born, and subsequently grows up in a poorer neighbouring household.

In El Idilio, a village on the banks of a river in the Amazon rainforest, Antonio Bolívar, known to everyone as "The Old Man," lives a recluse. One day, Antonio begins reading the romance novels that the traveling dentist Rubicondo Loachamin brings him to pass the time. He shares this occupation with a beautiful local girl, a waitress and prostitute, named Josefina, with whom he ends up falling in love. But all does not go smoothly when Antonio is forced to go on a hunting trip.

Max, an aimless middle-aged man, travels to Brussels. As he wanders the city streets, he meets three unlikely companions, with tensions rising among the group each passing hour.

An isolated farmhouse is chosen as a hide-out by criminals Jim and Charlie after an armed robbery. The Deleye family are forced to accept the situation under Jim's brutal domination.

An Ukranian woman enters Belgium illegally and hides in the van of a driver abandoned by his wife. He ends up helping her to find her husband who had emigrated long before. They are joined by his wacky Spanish mother and cute young daughter.

Six months after losing her only child in the Southeast Asia tsunami, Jeanne is convinced she sees him in a film about orphans living in the jungles.

A village outside Brussels is rocked when a child is killed in a hit-and-run accident and its inhabitants react in a variety of ways to the tragic news.

Three 'Bukowskian' torrid nights in the life of a man, Harry, in search of love. The first is as a youth, the second on the day of his high school graduation, and the third as a lonely, middle-aged man.

At the Paris airport Orly, a woman falls for a stranger, a family heads to a funeral, a couple lose touch, a wife reads her husband’s break-up letter. All wait for their planes. Absorbed in their immediate fates, they move through the impeccably structured space, unaware of a looming threat outside.